Big Data – The Weird And The Wonderful
By Daniel Price
Chess is one of the world’s most popular sports. There are an estimated 700 million regular players which include two million professionals; those at the pinnacle of the sport can expect to earn in excess of $2 million per year – more than a lot of competitors in more ‘traditional’ sports.
Given the nature of the game it is perfect for data collection and statistical analysis. Games between the world’s best have every move faithfully recorded to enable others to study and learn from their strategies.
If you’re a lover of the game then the good news is that all this data is available for free download. The ‘Chess Million Base’ has a mammoth 2.2 million games available for study, including all major championship games dating back as far as 1970. With forty moves per game on average, the database is predicted to contain almost 90 million individual entries.
By Daniel Price
(Actually, my database has about 7+ million games)
I have 5 games.